I Hear The Sound of Chainsaws.

One of Granny Cedar's many Eyes.

I Hear The Sound of Chainsaws. 

It is coming from the deep, wild, woods. I am revolted. I cross the fences, descend down a hill and trail to the vast clearing that surrounds a sacred tree - beyond it, just out of sight, behind a veil of trembling leaves is the source of it all. It is beyond the River, and over the Hill - beyond the mythic horizon.  It is something terrible, it's not merely chainsaws and bulldozers and bright blue floodlights. It is perverted, and its wrongness affronts me and raises primordial fear and disgust. The things it raises in the back of my head, the things I know it does and wants... they are the true evils.

And realize that this is a nightmare. 

Weeks later it happens again.

It begins the same but the destruction is further along. I watch as the bulldozers begin to gnaw away at the woods until the shape shifters and spirits are driven to flee. I give them sanctuary on my land... Even as the developers try to run them down with jeeps and guns. One of the shape-shifters attacks me as a last ditch effort: make me one of it's kind and I cannot possibly refuse their request (I would not have done so before, but I don't blame it for a lack of faith).  I cry out so loudly that I wake my spouse, who begins trying to shake me out of the dream - I am yelling to the developers to get off of, and out of, my territory before I eat the heart and soul of every one of them.

Then it happens again. These intruders want the wild, but hate what dwells in it. They have turned the deep woods into a gentrified housing edition. Twelve foot high brick walls of perfect masonry (with just a touch of "rustic" flare), trees trimmed and ringed in white paint and squirrel guards. It affronts them that I allow "monsters" to dwell in my "glorious garden".  I shout that the wilds aren't a garden, that the creatures in it are not monsters. That this place is not their place to claim and own. That I will not wish for nature to destroy them, but I will work for their destruction by other means. They tell me I am a redneck savage. That their wild is THE wild now.

Another week, another dream. The circus-sabbat of Unseen Things - like a page out of American Gods - encamped in my back yard that they have enlarged and turned into a mixture of things that were once there (and long-since torn down), and new structures they have erected out of the aethers. The rest-stop bathroom and dive bar are nice touches. They are rowdy and drunk and enraged... war is coming. War is coming to wrest control of the life force of the very land itself from those who would hoard it's bounty to their kin alone.

 The wild once owned the world. 

There was no thing that was not wild, untamed and free. Bit-by-bit People (not just Humans, but the other Hominids and Folk who learned to walk softly and carry a big stick) began to change it. Every creature does, don't get me wrong. Early Peoples were no different than ants, beavers, termites...etc. Our changes likely had the same beneficial nature in the beginning. Where we foraged we spread seeds, where we hunted we encouraged carrion-eaters. But, somewhere, somehow, something changed. 

The imbalance was still there. Right up until we tamed lightening the true wild ate at civilization, and humanity. It once consumed what we wrested from it to survive. Now, it is the wild which huddles in it's hedgerows shivering and fearing our unnatural light. We bring poison and disease. We bring destruction and menace. We are the boogeymen,  but we have cornered the beasts. We are unprepared for what we are now facing, when it has nothing left to lose.  Civilization won the night battle, and the wilds were starved into madness.

 It's no longer about "Us" and "Them"

 It's ensuring mutual survival.

The dreams so disturb me that I investigate while awake, I find a "For Sale" sign hanging on the fences nearby - adjacent to the Deep Woods, but too close for comfort. I weep.

The wilds are being plowed down, wiped out, and paved over.  Not this tiny scrap I know and love per se, but the entirety of the Wilds, and the spirit of them. Those savage, wonderful, spirits are being driven into the few remaining islands where the earth isn't being scorched and ruined to them.  The Unseen Hosts are gathering forces, and rattling spears.

At the core of why I even dared to post about weird apocalyptic dreams: The sad truth is that it is not just "them" on the other side of that brick wall, it's "us" too. It's the Witches and Workers and Walkers who enter the Wild with the thought in their heart that this is there for them.  The gentry amongst the monsters seeking to take and tame. Each of us must be cognizant of this, and vigilant against that kind of "manifest destiny" thinking.  We are blessed to be here, we are given a rare gift to be permitted - to hear and know and understand and be granted access to the Holiest of Holies.

If I have harped on any, one, point over the years... this has been that point. It will continue to be that point until that point is blunted, and rusted, and old, and considered as obvious as "the earth is round".